Video Cards
For those people who are looking for a laptop with a high resolution display, one important factor involved in their decision should be video memory. Generally, the more video memory in the laptop, the higher the possible resolution and the more colors it will display. As a rule, less than 8 megabytes of memory in a notebook video card is considered substandard and should be steered clear of.

One thing to look out for is when the video card uses shared video memory. What this means is that the graphics adapter does not have any memory of its own, but instead will borrow some of the RAM that is available to the motherboard. Laptops with this option end up running on less RAM than is installed because part of the memory is taken up by the video card. So if there is a low amount of memory installed in the computer in the first place, there will be performance issues not only with the processing speed, but with the display as well.

3D graphics are another topic to consider, as this type of graphic requires a special chip to be able to handle the intensive calculations needed to process moving 3D vector shapes. NVidia and ATI are considered the top chipmakers that produce 3D video cards for laptops, and the NVidia GeForce Go and the ATI Mobility Radeon are just two of their many offerings to turn up in high-end notebook computers lately.

An added bonus to getting a decent laptop video card from one of these manufacturers is that it will often come with several different outputs in case you would rather watch the action from a display other than the laptop’s LCD display. Some cards will let you output directly to a television by using RCA or S-Video connectors, while others might support dual monitors. In this case, you can plug two monitors into the computer and then set up the operating system to treat both monitors as one display. It can be kind of creepy at first to see your mouse moving from one monitor to the next, but it’s a great way to add more real estate to your desktop if you constantly find yourself running out of room.